1. Field
The following description relates to a system and a method for information acquisition of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) data as a cloud based service.
2. Description of Related Art
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) may transform peoples' daily lives. A WSN senses and disseminates information from various environments, and may serve many diverse applications. In more detail, a WSN is a network of physical sensors that may include several hundred nodes, which spatially and temporally track environments of interest to sample physical data, such as a temperature, a humidity, a light, an inclination, an acceleration, a chemical, a substance, a physiological measurement, an environmental change, and/other physical data known to one of ordinary skill in the art. This data is then either stored temporarily in the local nodes or wirelessly transmitted immediately to a gateway. WSNs can be used to monitor as well as control, and they form a constituent of ubiquitous sensing, communication, computing, and control.
WSNs are deployed for a wide range of applications, such as environmental monitoring, location tracking, military intelligence (surveillance), precision agriculture, disaster management services, factory instrumentation, hospital management and information tracking, and/or other applications known to one of ordinary skill in the art. With use of WSN technology likely to increase many fold, a large amount of WSN data will be generated. This valuable, informative data will remain underutilized if not made accessible to end users.
Integrating WSNs with a cloud computing infrastructure eases management of storage and computational resources. It also provides application data over the Internet. Combining WSNs with cloud computing makes it easier to share and analyze real-time sensor data on-the-fly. It also provides sensor data or sensor events as a service over the Internet.
Conventional methods use an ad-hoc process and thread based solution to send WSN data to a cloud. The use of ad-hoc processes and threads for data collection and forwarding requires recompilation/porting of logic for different platforms. Moreover, ad-hoc processes and threads require assistance for load balancing in a network. Some existing methods provide an infrastructure for abstraction of physical sensors, but these fail to provide the abstraction with flexibility and scalability.
Accordingly, there is still a huge gap in bringing together information available from heterogeneous, distributed resources of WSNs to a non-localized user. As such, a system and a method to enhance WSNs' data availability, accessibility, and utilization using cloud computing is appreciated.